In the last decade of his life, Talcott Parsons devoted a large part of his scholarly attention to the sociology of religion and to the history and symbolism of Christianity. This part of Parsons' work has been almost completely neglected – both in the literature on Parsons and in the sociology of religion. In my interpretation, Parsons' late systems-theoretical ‘human condition paradigm’ is separated from his quasi-structuralist analyses of Jewish and Christian myths. The core of these myths is, according to Parsons, the idea of life as a gift. The article analyses the importance of this idea for(1) a sociological understanding of Christianity, (2) some aspects of contemporary moral theorizing, particularly the question how the Judeo-Christian tradition can be appropriated under the condition of highly developed autonomous individuality, and (3) the question of a latent Protestant bias in Parsons' theory of social change.